Customer Reviews

Studying the Clinician

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I can't tell you how pleased and excited I was to have an opportunity to read the original manuscript of what will undoubtedly be one of the most important books in clinical psychology for the next decade or so. This, I predict, will be a classic.

-JERRY S. WIGGINS, PHD Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of British Columbia

This book is essential reading for all mental health practitioners and should be on the reading list of all training programs. Dr. Garb provides a thorough synthesis of a disparate, diffuse, and complex literature in an exceptionally readable fashion.

-JONATHAN RABINOWITZ, DSW School of Social Work, Bar Ilan University, Israel

This book is a monumental accomplishment. It is easily the most comprehensive survey of the literature on clinical judgment available today. It forms a worthy successor to the esteemed earlier volume by Jerry Wiggins, with an even broader focus. Anyone seriously interested in clinical judgment in psychology! will surely wish to own this book.

-WILLIAM M. GROVE, PHD Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota

Garb's "Studying the Clinician" is an astonishly comprehensive synthesis of nearly everything that has been done on clinical judgment in psychology. It is the successor to Wiggins's text, and it will be the definitive work on this topic for many years to come.

This book provides a unique and overdue compilation and review of a critical area of research in the field of clinical assessment. The science of clinical judgment reveals that the judgment of even the most seasoned clinicians is replete with errors and a false sense of confidence. This text should be required reading in graduate training for psychologists.

Though Garb offers the kind of enticing indictment of clinician reasoning that was once favored in the so-called biases and heuristic literature of the 1970s and 1980s, the review of studies in this text lack the kind of ecological validity that would have made a difference by now in our understanding of clinical reasoning. Because these studies, more often than not, display clinicians taking part in chess-games, puzzles, and mutliple-choice questions, all in an effort to show how clinicians are prone to error in clinical reasoning, the text offers the reader no sense whatsoever of how clinicians actually reason in real-time clinical settings. The absense of this ecological validity - that is, the absense of displaying clinical reasoning in real-time settings rather than in having clinicians play chess and observing their reasoning - it is this absense of ecological validity that robs the book of its claim to importance.

Though Garb offers the kind of enticing indictment of clinician reasoning that was once favored in the so-called biases and heuristic literature of the 1970s and 1980s, the review of studies in this text lack the kind of ecological validity that would have made a difference by now in our understanding of clinical reasoning. Because these studies, more often than not, display clinicians taking part in chess-games, puzzles, and mutliple-choice questions, all in an effort to show how clinicians are prone to error in clinical reasoning, the text offers the reader no sense whatsoever of how clinicians actually reason in real-time clinical settings. The absense of this ecological validity - that is, the absense of displaying clinical reasoning in real-time settings rather than in having clinicians play chess and observing their reasoning - it is this absense of ecological validity that robs the book of its claim to importance.